Instructor Resources – Writing Research Identity: Living and Writing in the World

Students will learn to understand and articulate how learning new skills and ideas affects their thinking and behavior as writers. Students will use knowledge gained in all of the other seven learning outcome areas to demonstrate this ability.

Learning About

Description:Jenn shares how she doesn’t “just sit and write for my job” and wonders about her qualifications for coming and talking to students about writing, but then Jenn realizes that she is, in fact, a writer. How does Jen come to this new view? Is writing defined as an isolated act or as a dynamic social activity?

Student Ready

Description: Nave is confronted with the work of graffiti artist SOL and is compelled to relate the works he encounters with his own creative writing. As he does so, he asserts that writing is as much about establishing identity and existence as it is about executing craft and technique. In the end, he argues for a “graffiti consciousness” that enables all text producers to see themselves as writers, regardless of their scholarly or artistic credentials

Description: Eagon utilizes her personal struggle writing a film analysis to illustrate the ups and downs of her writing process and her negative feelings towards the act. By describing the literate activities she practices and the frustration she encounters as a result, Eagon debunks the rather romanticized idea that writing is inspired and instead reveals it to be a slow and stressful experience. She also admits that the writing experience is different for every writer and every genre. Consequently, she realizes in the end that though the process may never be easy, she can begin to approach writing with less anxiety by trying out various writing habits to find what suits her individual needs best.

Description: Witherspoon’s article chronicles her process of writing a genre research report and describes her approach to performing a genre analysis of a scholarly academic journal. She suggests that the method she used can be applied to studying any genre of writing, and she discusses a method to determine the audience of a genre, known as an audience- reception study. Witherspoon’s article shares her experiences as a writing researcher, the ups and downs of writing a genre research report, and her journey to conduct a study of genre and audience.

Description: Different professions require the ability to write in different genres. When Amanda Rinehart switched careers, she had to learn new writing genres as a part of changing her professional identity. Because her profession is important to her and part of who she is, she’s been working hard at it. Combining her two professional identities when she writes is even harder because it involves two different versions of who she is. Learning new writing genres is a lifelong endeavor, requiring a lot of writing research, some introspection, and positive relationships with colleagues.

Teacher Background Knowledge

Description:In his talk, Dr. Purdy proposes that to prepare students for their college career, and civic endeavors, universities must promote an understanding of literacies that builds on students’ rich extracurricular, digital lives and make literacies instruction the shared responsibility of the entire campus community. Rhetoric and writing teacher-scholars are in a unique position to lead this effort. After reviewing prevailing definitions of literacy and exigent research about students’ research-writing practices, he shares seven foundational ideas for a different approach to literacy. He closes by offering six pedagogical and five programmatic ideas for enacting this approach to literacies.

Description: Part I Theoretical approaches to writing and identity: discourse and identity– literacy and identity– issues of identity in academic writing. Part II The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing – an investigation with eight mature students: Rachel Dean – a case study of writing and identity– the origins of discoursal identity in writers’ experience– the sense of self and the role of the reader in the discoursal construction of writer identity– the discoursal construction of academic community membership– multiple possibilities for self-hood in the academic discourse communities– writer identity on the agenda in theory and in practice.

Description: Writing is a complex and learned activity in that it requires us to shape our thoughts into words and texts that are appropriate for the purpose, audience and medium of a variety of communicative forms. Writers must constantly make decisions about how to represent their subject matter and themselves through language. In this way, writing can be conceptualised as a performance whereby writers shape and represent their identities as they mediate social structures and personal considerations. In this paper I use theories of reflexivity and discourse to analyse interviews and writing samples of culturally and linguistically diverse Australian primary students for evidence of particular kinds of writing identities. Findings indicate a clear influence of particular teaching strategies and contexts on the writing identities of students. I argue that making students aware of their writing choices, the influences on, and the potential impact of those choices on themselves, their text and their audience, is a new imperative in the teaching of writing.